Strange Fruit
by Trin2
Summary: SLASH. Draco's only just learning that not all presents are pleasant, and not all parcels contain something dead.


There is **SLASH **in this fic. If you don't like it, the "Back" button is there for a reason.

Disclaimer: Harry Potter, et al, is property of J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. 

***

Lucius likes fruits. Wooden crates stuffed with soft padding to limit bruising, smelling of somewhere hot and humid, arrive at the Malfoy Manor every month. Draco prowls around them, running his hands over the exotic, grained wood that wasn't expensive hard oak -- cheap wood from cheap labour. It's probably around the cheapest thing that Draco has been around. He's eleven. 

Once, one of the house-elves had carried the crate past him in the corridor and a splinter of wood embedded itself in Draco's arm. As Draco cried and whimpered in his mother's arms, her eyes steadily growing colder and colder, the house-elf shrank like dirty laundry. 

The next day, there was a bonfire outside the Malfoy Manor involving the now-empty crate and something small and tiny, screaming and twisting upon itself inside the box, dying down until there was only the crackling of burning wood. Narcissa's eyes only grew colder still.

The unpacking of the crates excites Draco, the same way unwrapping presents does. Lying in the packing material are gems of muted tropical colours of different sizes, bearing with them their mysterious names that sound like spells that do equally mysterious things. 

The Malfoy family considers the normal food cheap and plebeian. So they drink liquor distilled from the tears of the ostrich; the tears it cries but no-one sees when it stuffs its head in sand; eat delicate and tender flesh from rare Abyssinian cats; grilled beluga whale fat; Belgian chocolates filled with the creamy tears of the mooncalf. So they have their own personal stash of fruits from the tropical regions imported to them direct from heat-ridden, strife-beaten countries.

Draco cradles the fruits in his hands, running their names over in his head -- dragonfruit. Cherimoya. Chiku. Dragonfruit is his favourite. It's bigger than his small hand, which will grow bigger as years go by -- but now, that concept is as foreign to him as the giant, pinkish-tinged green-spiked fruit that lies on the chopping board in the Malfoy kitchen. The house-elves always cut it wrong, the flesh sour and unwilling to give, until it explodes in Draco's mouth as he bites down; yielding the secret wisdom of dark and dank rainforests, juice trickling down his throat, leaving sticky trails of nectar. 

Cherimoya is sickly sweet -- Draco doesn't like it. It has small raised bulges in its flesh, as if something is crawling inside waiting to escape. The too-sweet taste bursts in his mouth and leaves his tongue feeling overpowered, unable to take in all the flavours and tinges of other fruits that he can find in the cherimoya itself. 

Lucius likes all of them. Narcissa eats the Chinese pears daintily, sharp mouth cutting into the pale skin like knives. The house-elves eat none and gorge themselves on grass because they cannot bring themselves to eat anything else. Lucius had long since given up trying to feed them anything else, and claimed it kept the front lawn in wonderful shape.

Once, Draco had the distinct misfortune of seeing their piss. It was green and runny and smelled like decomposing dead shrubbery.

This month, though, an unusually large extra crate arrives. Draco doesn't go near it. There seems to be something inside that makes the entire box shake with restrained anger. 

The man who delivered it grins at Lucius and tells him that they'd found "the poor sod when they were harvesting fruit; moron was up a tree trying to get at some baby dragons" and tells Lucius to have fun. It's what he always says and probably says to everyone; but now there is a very distinct boorish expression on his face. 

Lucius stands to one side and watches with a curious expression on his face as the house-elves force it open. The wooden walls of the crate fall apart. 

A man is crouched in one corner, eyes lidded from the darkness of the crate. He blinks heavily and leaps for Lucius' throat. 

Lucius prises the man with tangled red hair off, and casts an Imperius spell on him. He laugh for a very long time, than goes up to the master bedroom, the man following him stiffly, like a zombie. 

Lucius' velvet sleeves drag and sweep across the banisters of the marble staircase. Narcissa's eyes break their coldness for a while what looks like icicles melting trickle out of the corners of her eyes, then are brushed away by Draco's pale fingers. He runs to her for a hug, sensing somehow with childish intuition that she needed it more than he did.

She kneels, graciously accepting it and graciously accepting being held by eleven-year-old arms wrapped around her small shoulders. Draco wonders, sometimes, how much else she graciously accepted, the docile wife. How many other very masculine surprises came in past years that he had forgotten, wrapped in exotic wood.

At dinner, the red-haired man sits with them, next to Lucius. Lucius looks at him constantly, calls him "my pet" in a way that makes Draco want to throw up. Narcissa sits and eats nothing but small jewels of deep ruby-red fruit whose names Draco can't remember. 

Draco can feel the slow, languid movement of wandering legs and feet tangled in each other beneath the table, toes sliding across the insides of thighs. Narcissa just sits and chews. Draco does the same. If the way Lucius ate could be any more sexualized, grey eyes grinning, he would be eating bananas. 

Halfway through, Lucius throws down his cutlery and stands up, walks out of the dining hall. The man follows like a mechanical doll.

Narcissa chews and then suddenly says, "He's called Charles Weasley," and puts her face in her hands, lying through her teeth. "I'm sorry, Draco. My eyes hurt." 

A few nights later, Draco works up the gall and stands outside the master bedroom, listening. Narcissa has gone to sleep one of the many guest rooms. There is the sound of vague keening sex, moans and drawn-out gasps and heavy breathing. Somebody, a friend, had told Draco that his father had given him the embarrassing, humiliating talk about sex before he went off to boarding school. Draco supposed this was as close as he was going to get one from Lucius.

There was an unfamiliar voice that says, "Somebody outside," and then dissolves into breathlessness.

There is a whispered spell and silence hits the entire room like a blanket, muffling out anything else. Draco runs to his room, tripping over too-long pyjama trousers, heart pounding, knowing that tomorrow he would be beaten for his impudence. 

He slams the door shut and climbs into his bed, shaking and then shaking some more until finally, he smothers himself in blankets and convulses, unable to go to sleep. He gets up and finds Narcissa, wide-eyed and knowing that the silence is induced by a spell and not sexual inactivity. He gives a fake excuse about a nightmare. 

Somewhere in his mind, Draco wishes that his entire family could stop hiding from what they want to do, and when they finally have to give in, cloak it under pretence. He knows that Narcissa wants comfort and doesn't want it because it will make her seem needy and stupid; Malfoys are never needy and stupid. 

Narcissa clucks her tongue at the nightmare and she graciously allows Draco to sleep in her bed for tonight, for his comfort and protection. They both curl up under the guest bedsheets in mutual sympathy for the common plights they share that they cannot say out loud. When his mother finally slips into restless sleep, Draco is still awake, plagued by the one thought: I hate Charles Weasley.

The next day, the red-haired man stands by the door, with the same blank expression on his face. He is going home, Lucius explains with no embarrassment whatsoever. Draco knows it's not because Draco heard them having sex, but because Draco heard Lucius having sex. And that's is the most vulnerable Draco's ever heard his father be before. All the Malfoys love to keep up appearances. 

Lucius takes Charlie Weasley to a train station and buys him a ticket back to his home. Before the train comes, he kisses his pet on the lips, whispers a memory loss spell into his pet's ear as a sort of final kindness, one of the very few he's given to Charlie in the past few days and especially nights.

Lucius has given instructions to him to go home, back to the Weasley Burrow. The Imperius spell will wear off immediately as soon as Charlie steps into the Burrow. Lucius imagines much hugging and crying of "Where have you been?", courtesy of the Weasley clan. Comfort food like thick steaming soup will be offered to the bewildered Charlie, who will of course have no recollection of why he has come home. 

Lucius knows Arthur Weasley from work, and thought at first that breaking his irritating colleague's son through mindless fucking might make the Muggle lover do the world a favour by curling up and dying.

But Charlie's been a nice diversion from work for a while, in the restless summer. This memory spell, this small kindness so unbecoming of a Malfoy to give, is something that Lucius will not acknowledge to anybody, not even himself.

As Charlie's train takes to the tracks with Charlie on it, a Muggle passes him and growls, "fucking fairy". Lucius grins and grants him permanent loss of sexual potency -- a very handy spell indeed. 

Then he turns to return back to Malfoy Manor, where his dutiful wife and son await. 

In a few weeks time, the Malfoys' only son will leave for Hogwarts. There Draco will meet Ron Weasley, recognize the flaming red hair and the surname immediately and learn to loathe even the mere sight of Ron. More importantly, Draco will meet Harry Potter again, whom Lucius has spent the better part of his life trying to kill in order to please his shadowy employer, Voldemort.

Draco will hardly recognize the incoherent, strange intensity he has to Harry Potter, and will spend most of his early years at Hogwarts trying to hate and land Harry into trouble. Later on, sixteen-year-old Draco will kiss Harry while under the influence of too much Butterbeer. Apparently, drunken Draco Malfoy knows how to articulate the strange feelings of the sober Draco Malfoy much better. And things will escalate from there.

But for now, Draco Malfoy is eleven years old and the future stretches out forever and forever into the sunrise. Being a child, Draco is weirdly optimistic about it. Surely this strange period of sex behind doors and walls and hidden vulnerability has ended.


End file.
